The Primary Experiment: Jimmy Who?

Jimmy Carter ran for President with little money, no major backers, and a mostly skeptical press.Credit Photograph via AP

Forty years ago, when Jimmy Carter, a former one-term Georgia governor, was running for President, a headline in the Atlanta Constitution said, “Jimmy Who Is Running for What!?” Carter got little respect from the Democratic Party establishment, from the inhabitants of Georgetown, or from the influential Times columnist James Reston, who referred to the five-feet-nine candidate as “Wee Jimmy.” But Carter and his so-called Peanut Brigade had a plan: to spend a lot of time in Iowa, a state with a curious tradition—voting in highly personal caucuses—where George McGovern had, four years earlier, almost defeated the front-runner, Edmund Muskie. Although he finished ten points behind “uncommitted,” Carter won the state. Assessing Carter’s talent and endurance, a few political journalists guessed the future, and may have “invented” the Iowa caucuses by focussing on Carter and treating his victory as one of primary importance.

What has since become clear is that participants and observers at the time, in an unacknowledged, unplanned collaboration, were conducting a political experiment: to discover whether it was possible for a “Jimmy Who?” to run for President with little money (Carter and his volunteers often slept in the homes of supporters), no major backers, and a mostly skeptical press, and to do so while facing big-league talent, which then included the senators Henry (Scoop) Jackson, of Washington, and Birch Bayh, of Indiana; the former Vice-President Hubert Humphrey; and the thirty-eight-year-old governor of California, Jerry Brown. I met Carter at about that time, in upstate New York; he was there to meet local Party officials and, accompanied by an entourage of about two people, worked the room, saying again and again, “I’m Jimmy Carter, from Georgia!”

So far this year, only one big-league Democrat, Hillary Clinton, has declared her candidacy, and she promptly set out for Iowa. Her visit lasted three days, taking her to “small” events, including a fast-food meal, and she brought along dozens of campaign workers, who will stay behind and keep working there. In an op-ed published in the Des Moines Register, she talked about the “great ideas” she got from her trip: “I will carry the stories and wisdom of the Iowans I met with me throughout the campaign and hopefully onto the White House.” According to the Washington Post, Clinton’s op-ed mentioned five Iowans, all of whom happened to be among the thirteen selected for one of her carefully organized roundtables. Not much was being left to chance.

Clinton is some forty points ahead of other Democrats in Iowa, so it’s easy to write off her potential competitors, among them the former Maryland governor (and, ahem, former Baltimore mayor) Martin O’Malley and the former Virginia senator Jim Webb, both of whom are “exploring” possible runs; and the independent Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and who has skipped the exploration step. Sanders’s appeal is close to that of the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who seems to mean it when she says she’s not running, although, as Ryan Lizza reported, she intends to make her influence felt.

But for all that, perhaps it’s too early to declare the race over. Webb is a particularly interesting case. Like Jimmy Carter, he’s a Southerner, a veteran (in Webb’s case, a decorated combat veteran), and out of step with the Party on some issues (he strongly supports gun ownership). Yet, like Warren and Sanders, he has little sympathy for Wall Street (for years, he’s made an issue of income inequality), and he showed an early willingness to take on such issues as mass incarceration—“courageously stepping into the void, calling for a national commission to re-assess criminal justice policy,” as a Timeseditorial put it in 2008. (Clinton, in the wake of the rioting in Baltimore, just made it one of her issues, too.)

The candidacies of O’Malley, Sanders, and Webb, and probably others, might be seen as an updated version of the Carter experiment—to discover, as Webb recently told George Stephanopoulos, whether it’s “possible to conduct a viable campaign” in conditions that, in 2016, seem to make the venture preposterously out of reach. The former Florida governor Jeb Bush, one of the Republican front-runners, referred to those conditions the other day when he said that a candidate shouldn’t need a billion dollars to run (this is the obscene amount that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, give or take a few million, each spent in 2012) while announcing that he’d already set a record for fund-raising in the first hundred days. (Bush didn’t reveal figures, but the Wall Street Journalnoted that the previous record was held by Hillary Clinton, who raised thirty-six million dollars in her first hundred days, in 2008.)

Unlike the Republicans, who have already scheduled at least six debates before the Iowa caucuses, the Democratic schedule is T.B.D., and it’s possible that voters won’t even get a chance to see the Democratic candidates side by side. Clinton was often formidable in debates in 2008, when she competed with Barack Obama, as was Webb in 2007, when Democrats picked him to respond to George W. Bush’s State of the Union message. He addressed income disparity (“When one looks at the health of our economy, it’s almost as if we are living in two different countries”) and, with devastating accuracy, Iraq: “The President took us into this war recklessly. He disregarded warnings from the National Security Advisor during the first Gulf War, the chief of staff of the Army, two former commanding generals of the Central Command … and many, many others with great integrity and long experience in national-security affairs. We are now, as a nation, held hostage to the predictable ­ and predicted ­ disarray that has followed.” Webb, though, didn’t seek reëlection in 2012, in large part because he deeply disliked the business, and the politicking, of politics, a real drawback if he is serious about running for President. And if he is serious, he will no doubt have to revisit some earlier statements, such as in a 1979 magazine article in which he argued against a combat role for women in the military, and his complicated view of affirmative action. Yet he appears able to change his mind; like many others, he has been “evolving” on the question of same-sex marriage, and on “Meet the Press” said, “I think this has been a good thing for the country.”

Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, has weaknesses that won’t simply vanish—most recently, the bad publicity surrounding the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, a charitable enterprise vulnerable to charges of mismanagement and conflicts of interest, which, as the New York columnist Jonathan Chait wrote, was “a kind of quasi-government run by themselves, which was staffed by their own loyalists and made up the rules as it went along.” All that is only increasing the appetite of the Republican contenders. There are many on that side, some of them unnervingly weird, all of them ravenous for the Presidency, and all wanting nothing more than to face a candidate who, like Jeb Bush, will have a hard time exciting voters looking for nondynastic faces and fresh ideas.

In 1976, the Watergate scandal and the Vietnam War were still fresh, and the pollster Patrick Caddell could say, “If it weren’t for the country looking for something in 1976, Carter could never have gotten elected. He would never have been allowed out of the box. No one would have paid attention to him.” That was in a time before techno-consultants and bottomless wells of money, when it still seemed possible for a Jim or Martin or Bernie “Who?” to alter a race whose outcome appeared predetermined. Possible or not, it was once a valuable, even essential, experiment, and one well worth conducting again.

Jeffrey Frank, a former senior editor of The New Yorker and the author of “Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage,” is working on a book about the Truman era.